The Cycles of Collapse: On Philosophy, Disorder, and the Fate of Civilization

Civilizations don’t fall by accident—they erode when language and meaning decay, as history's greatest thinkers have repeatedly shown us.

I’ve recently turned to Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy—a student text in the 20th century—to jog my brain and get the creative juices flowing again. He begins, in the first section on appearance and reality, with a line that feels foundational not only to philosophy, but to science, journalism, and even criminal investigation:

“In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe.”

This is really it: all investigations begin with contradiction. Something doesn’t add up, and that becomes the signal to dig deeper.

Philosophy’s Arcs and Dead Ends

The analytical method has had several golden ages—Aristotle, then Descartes, and finally Kant, who in many ways reached the outer limits of Western analytical philosophy. The 20th century gave us Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, but I’d argue these were less revolutions than rediscoveries—Eastern non-dual philosophy rewritten in Western vocabulary. In a way, they were circling back to Heraclitus, whose lone work, On Nature, might have prevented centuries of detour had it survived.

This circularity points to a disturbing pattern: history itself moves in cycles. Societies rise, meanings stabilize, epistemology advances, language refines, governance strengthens—and then all of it collapses under contradictions. Out of the wreckage, a new society emerges.

Collapse in the Mirror of History

At every inflection point, the same anxieties surface. Hobbes structured Leviathan like a geometric proof, defining terms with precision to fend off refutation. Locke, touched by civil war, concentrated on epistemology (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding), language (Of the Abuse of Words), and governance (Two Treatises of Government).

Witnesses to the fall of the Third Reich—Victor Klemperer, in Language of the Third Reich—saw language disintegrate. Nietzsche had already destabilized meaning (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Dissidents in the Eastern Bloc, like Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless), diagnosed the same collapse of shared reality.

Again and again, the same arc: erosion of meaning, corruption of language, collapse of governance.

The Probable Role of Disordered Personalities

What strikes me is how needless this cycle feels. My working hypothesis is that collapse correlates with the infiltration of disordered personalities into human systems. These individuals embrace instrumental logic—using words not to discover truth, but to manipulate outcomes. They corrode reason, erode Aristotelian logic, and normalize absurdity.

In our own time, meaning itself feels under siege. Logic and rhetoric have degraded. Governance teeters. The culture reflects it: thinner, cheaper, less anchored in truth. Collapse feels imminent, almost like a law of history.

Gresham’s Law Applied to Politics

Thomas Gresham noted that “bad money drives out good.” Applied to human systems, we might say: when disordered personalities are allowed to set the terms, disorder becomes the norm.

But as with economics, there is nuance. Thiers’ Law observed the opposite—good money sometimes displaces bad, as when weak economies adopted the U.S. dollar. Robert Mundell refined the principle: bad money drives out good only if they trade at equal value.

Applied to politics, the parallel is clear. Our media’s neutrality bias—false equivalence—treats good-faith, evidence-based positions as equal to manipulative or absurd ones. Climate change is the prime example: a scientific consensus is presented as a “debate” between two sides of equal weight, when objectively, one side is grounded in overwhelming evidence and the other in denial.

When reason and unreason are treated as equivalent, unreason wins—not because it is stronger, but because it is simpler, more comfortable, and better tailored to cognitive bias. This is how collapse accelerates.

Closing Thought

We are living through one of those cycles now. The erosion of meaning, the abuse of language, and the rise of instrumental logic are not abstract trends—they are visible in daily politics and media. The challenge is whether we will allow the “bad money” of disordered rhetoric to dominate, or whether we will recognize the pattern and break the cycle before a likely descent into armed conflict or mass murder.

History shows us that both outcomes are possible. The question is whether we have the courage—and the clarity—to choose the latter.